Intel Launches Oak Trail Atom Z670 Processor

Intel has just officially launched its Atom Z670 processor (aka Oak Trail) designed for mobile devices (Tablets, Netbooks) and embedded applications (medical devices, payment systems…). Late last month, Intel had accidentally leaked information about this processor on its website… According to Intel, the Atom Z670 is better than the previous generation in every way: absolute performance, absolute power consumption and performance/Watt. These are three key metric for mobile applications, and you can be sure that a large number of independent tests are going to be published today.

The graphics processor and the memory controller, two relatively big blocks, are now part of the same silicon die as the processor. This leads to potential cost and power savings. Intel has also added dedicated video hardware that can handle 1080p decoding. In the past, HD video decoding has been a tough cookie for Atom. Intel is also introducing Intel Enhanced Deeper Sleep, a technology that saves more power when the computer is idle.

On the performance side, Intel expects “double-digits” performance increases on average, but it obviously depends on individual applications. The Graphics core should be much faster as it is clocked at 400Mhz (from 200Mhz). The system memory has also been upgraded to DDR2-800 (from DDR2-400/533).

You can expect many related product announcements today, and in the coming weeks. Existing Atom customers will upgrade their line-up, but we should also see a number of players in the tablet space announce Atom-based products. Some, like Fujitsu and Samsung, had already shown devices based on this chip at CES 2011.